Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11302

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Drug firms go direct in UK
Pharmacy Daily (Australia) - registration required 2007 Aug 28
http://www.pharmacydaily.com.au

Full text:

BRITISH pharmacy groups are strongly opposed to an increasing trend in the UK for drug companies to offer home delivery of medications direct to patients.

It’s estimated that direct delivery is growing at up to 15% per year, with the UK Times newspaper reporting that logistical difficulties associated with the distribution of biologics is also contributing to the growth.

The report says the practice is now being used in some cases by Roche, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis, with estimates that home delivery may now comprise as much as 5% of the total UK market for pharmaceuticals.

Another factor is the way that health is funded in the UK, with a loophole in tax laws meaning that
local health trusts are able to avoid VAT on home delivered medications.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909